Since we have a bunch of guitar players and even a guitar maker on this blog, I thought everyone might appreciate a New Yorker piece about Robert Earl Keen visiting the Mandolin Brothers guitar store in New York. You should read the whole piece but the ending probably feels familiar to a few of you.
Finally, Jay handed Keen a Martin 000-45, one of only two hundred and sixty-five ever made, from 1930. Keen strummed it once, cocked his head, and then asked for a pick.
“You know what I said about some guitars just having songs in them?” he said. “This is one of them.” Keen’s fingers moved over the strings, but the rest of him seemed to float toward the ceiling.
“How much?” he asked, when he’d finished playing.
“Sixty-five thousand.”
“Damn, I always go for the most expensive guitar in the place, and after that nothing else sounds as good.”
Jay said the guitar was on hold for someone else, but “I could notify you if he doesn’t want it.”
“Yeah, right. Maybe you could also notify my banker.”
“Certainly,” Jay said. “And your wife. I’m good with wives. Do you want to call her now?” Jay pointed toward the phone in the next room. But Keen knew better than to follow him there.
Categories: Art · Music
Tagged: guitar, Martin 000-45, Music
Former four star General Karl Eikenberry, who serves as President Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan has weighed in on the troop build-up.
The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, senior U.S. officials said.
A four star dissenting from the Petraeus/McChrystal party line has really frosted some folks at the Pentagon. But Obama seems to be listening to Eikenberry.
Just in time.
Categories: Afghanistan · Barack Obama
Tagged: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Karl Eikenberry
The Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing story yesterday, depicting a class of laid-off former senior executives unable to scale down their lifestyle to reduced circumstances.
Paul Joegriner hasn’t worked since March 2008, when he was laid off from his $200,000-a-year job as chief executive officer of a small bank. But you wouldn’t know it by appearances.
His wife, Marzena, shuttles their two young children to private school every morning. The family recently vacationed in Virginia Beach, Va., and likes to dine on Porterhouse steaks. Since losing his job, Mr. Joegriner, 44 years old, has had several offers. He’s turned each down in hopes of landing a position comparable to what he held before.
The family’s lifestyle over the past year and a half has been propped up by a $200,000 severance package and another $100,000 in savings — funds the family has burned through rapidly. By Mr. Joegriner’s own calculations, the family will be out of money in six months if he doesn’t find work.
“It will be D-Day,” he says. “But on the outside, no one has any idea that we’re in trouble.”
Given that the lay-offs at the executive level started in January of 2009 and that the one year pay severance packages will be running out after Christmas, it seems like the Kings and Queens of Executive Denial will be having some serious conversations over holiday dinner with their spoiled children and spouses. Exactly how they could live for a year out of work without adjusting their spending habits says something about the “keeping up appearances” nature of the upper middle class in today’s America.
Welcome to the real world.
Categories: Business · Economics · Recession
Tagged: Executive Compensation, Recession, Severance pay, Unemployment
I was at a fascinating Afghanistan conference on Friday and Saturday at the USC/Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership and Policy. The hosts, Geoff Cowan and Derek Shearer called in a lot of chits and so the participants were an extraordinary group of policy advisors including Ambassadors Mort Abramowitz and Peter Galbraith, Admiral William Fallon, General Wesley Clark and State Department’s Jeremy Curtin. And because the main focus was on the media and the war we heard CNN’s Bill Schneider, NPR’s Mike Shuster and the LA Times Marjorie Miller , McClatchy’s Roy Gutmann and Truth Dig’s Robert Scheer.
During the course of the two days I kept thinking , “I sure hope President Obama is getting such a frank discussion of the perils of Empire in Afghanistan.” Even the military men were highly skeptical of a counter-insurgency strategy in a country as big and as resistant to foreign occupation as Pakistan. Ambassador Galbraith laid out in stunning detail how Karzai’s minions on the election commission stole the first round election–a theft so bold as would make old Boss Tweed turn over in his grave. It was clear that nothing was going to change in a second round and so Abdullah’s withdrawal was just an acknowledgement of what everyone at the UN already knew.
As for the press, Mike Shuster answered my question of why the MSM was such a prisoner of the “conventional wisdom”, cheerleading us into the Iraq War–”Reporters were intimidated by the power of administration sources.” It took Bob Scheer to ask the big question which even now many of the foreign correspondents seem loath to ask–”Why are we in Afghanistan and is our vast military empire making us more or less secure?”
In a time of Trillion dollar deficits and 30 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, I think the nation building has to be done in America not Afghanistan.
Categories: Afghanistan · Barack Obama · Corruption · Journalism · Politics
Tagged: Admiral William Fannon, Afghanistan, Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership, Derek Shearer, Geoff Cowan, Mike Shuster, Peter Galbraith, Robert Scheer
I’ve been reading Slavoj Zizek’s book, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
for the past week. This morning he talks about the irony of the celebrations of the Berlin Wall in a New York Times Op-Ed.
In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?
I’ve been writing about this for a while–while we cut investment, the Chinese are extending their financial ties to all corners of the world. The new Chinese loan package for Africa is just one example.
The loans and other overtures have turned China into one of Africa’s largest trading partners. Trade has soared to $106.8 billion last year from about $10 billion in 2000; Chinese direct investment in Africa leaped 81 percent in the first six months of this year, to $552 million, according to the Commerce Ministry.
While we spend trillions on Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chinese capitalists are becoming the largest suppliers of infrastructure to Africa. What’s wrong with this picture?
Categories: Afghanistan · Business · China · Economics · Foreign Policy · Innovation · Iraq War · Military Spending
Tagged: Afghanistan, Africa, Berlin Wall, Capitalism, China, Iraq War, Slavoj Zizek
Here is a scary thought. The Pareto Principle in economics says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In practical terms it might mean that 20% of your movies at Warner Bros. would generate 80% of the revenue. Pareto himself noted that 80% of the waelth in Italy was held by 20% of the people.
This morning unemployment hit 10.2%, a 26 year high. Yesterday the Labor Department reported that productivity surged to 9.5%. The U.S. has worked hard to transform itself into a knowledge economy and companies like Google and Goldman Sachs record record revenues per worker. What if some version of the Pareto Principle begins to apply itself to employment–20% of the workers produce 80% of the GDP? Dan Greenhaus of Miller Taback & Co has the grim reality of our future.
We have argued and continue to argue that another jobless recovery is materializing and if our estimates for G.D.P. growth going forward materialize, the unemployment rate will remain at elevated levels for several years. Nearly 16 million people are unemployed right now while another 9 million are working part-time jobs because they cannot get a full-time job.
So here is the reality of life for the bottom 40% of America’s families. After they pay for food, housing and transportation they have $1200 per year to spend on “discretionary items” like clothing, medicine and doctors. Keep reading →
Categories: Barack Obama · Business · Corruption · Credit Crisis · Defense Policy · Economics · Innovation · Interregnum · Military Spending · Politics · Recession · Wall Street · civil unrest
Tagged: Banking crisis, Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, Interregnum, Military Industrial Complex, Politics, Productivity, Rebuild America, Recession, Republican Party
The USC College Republicans sponsored (with the help of Campus Security) an ugly little bit of hypocrisy last night. David Horowitz, the right wing thug who runs the infamous academic blacklist (above) called Discover the Networks at the Horowitz “Freedom” Center, gave a speech to the Republican’s on campus. Needless to say, the hall was not filled, but for some reason, campus security kept quite a few students who didn’t agree with Horowitz out of the hall. The ones who did get in, were thrown out once they began their silent protest.
Heather Larabee, the assistant dean of students and director of Campus Activities said students were removed because they had disrupted the event. “They were blocking the views of people behind them, so that’s why they were asked to leave. Had they stood up silently and in the back rows, Horowitz would have been able to see them and that would have been fine,” she said.
Horowitz of course has an Alice in Wonderland view of all of this, claiming his academic freedom is being impinged because a few students stood up to protest his hate speech.
Horowitz said the groups protesting the College Republicans’ event and attempting to obstruct the speaker they invited should be put on probation for “a heinous assault on USC students. The administration itself is allowing this fascist attempt at free speech … to defile College Republicans,” he said, calling the protestors “lunatics the university refuses to discipline.”
Horowitz’s Discover the Network site has already put several USC professors including Annenberg’s Robert Scheer on his blacklist. The handy tool provided above allows College Conservatives to submit their own professors as candidates for the blacklist, which Horowitz promises to “research, compile and add to our resource.” The professors would then join other blacklisted “radicals” such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, religion scholar Karen Armstrong, University of Michigan Middle East scholar Juan Cole and a list of 500 others.
The very notion that the USC administration would cooperate with Horowitz’s Brownshirt tactics and assertions is an embarrassment.
Categories: Censorship · Education · Journalism · Politics
Tagged: Academic Freedom, David Horowitz, Robert Scheer, USC
Apple is quietly negotiating with all the TV networks to offer a $30 per month High Def TV on demand service. Initially it would be delivered through the Apple TV device, but I can see it also being packaged into TV’s by many other manufacturers who are already rolling out broadband ready TV’s.
Expanding the video side of Itunes is a smart move on Apple’s part, if you take into account that it has the credit card details of more than 100 million paying customers. Converting just ten per cent of those music fans into TV subscribers for a year would bag Apple and its potential network partners a staggering $3.6 billion.
Fox, Disney and NBC are already in business with Apple and of course Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder. This could be a huge win for Verizon which has a fiber to the home Broadband network (FIOS) capable of 100 MBPS, making the download of the High-Def shows almost instant. Could Comcast’s desire to buy NBC be some sort of very expensive blocking move?
What do you think?
Categories: Business · Entertainment · Innovation · Movies · Music · Technology · Television
Tagged: Apple, Apple TV, Disney, Fox, I Tunes, NBC, Steve Jobs
